Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Attaching Ribbon Trim and Hemming- All at Once!

So I decided to start working on the Wardrobe with one of the "easy" pieces- Simplicity 4147, the tiered skirt. The skirt is made of black cotton with white dots and I wanted to give it a little punch of color by adding hot pink satin ribbon to the edge of both tiers. I thought about it for a little while, and I decided to try using the ribbon trim to hide the raw edge of the skirt, in effect hemming and trimming at the same time. This is how I did it.

1. I used a fabric marker to mark the hem fold line on the wrong side of the fabric. The hem allowance was 5/8", so my line was 5/8" from the raw edge.

2. I laid the ribbon (right side up) on the wrong side of the fabric in the seam allowance, with the edge of the ribbon against the marked line.

3. I stitched close to the ribbon edge (against the line.)

4. To hide the raw ends of the ribbon, I folded the ends under, butted the folds together, and stitched across.

5. I trimmed the seam allowance narrower than the ribbon- in this case about 3/16".

6. I turned the ribbon to the right side, pressed, and stitched it down along the loose edge, encasing the raw edge between the fabric and the ribbon.

7. Voila! Ribbon trimmed edge!

Unfortunately, even though I'm quite happy with my ribbon hem, this is as far as I've gotten. You'll have to wait a bit longer to see the finished skirt.

1 comment:

Very clever! And once again our shared brain is scarily on the same wave pattern. I was just looking at patterns this morning and thinking I'd trim Lu's Easter/5th grade graduation dress in ribbon because it's such a cute hem. :P